Setsuo Miyazawa, Senior Professor of Law

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Professor Setsuo Miyazawa is a legal sociologist who received LL.B., LL.M., and S.J.D. from Hokkaido University and M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in sociology from Yale University. He has been a full-time faculty member at Hokkaido University (1972-1983), Kobe University (1983-2000), Waseda University (2000-2003), and Omiya Law School (2004-2007) in Japan. He is currently a professor of law at Aoyama Gakuin University Law School in central Tokyo, where he teaches the sociology of law, legal profession, and public interest lawyering, and coordinates courses on American law. He has also taught as a visiting professor at the law schools of York University (Canada), the University of Washington, Harvard University (Mitsubishi Visiting Professor of Japanese Legal Studies), UC Berkeley (Sho Sato Visiting Professor), UCLA, New York University (Global Law Faculty), the University of Hawaii, the University of Pennsylvania, and Fordham University. His first visit to Hastings was in 2008, and 2012 was his fourth visit. He has joined full time faculty at Hastings in the fall 2013. He will teaches at Hastings in the fall and at Aoyama Gakuin University in the spring.

Professor Miyazawa has a wide range of research interests, including police and criminal justice, legal ethics and public interest lawyering, legal education, and corporate legal practice; he received his doctoral degree in Japan with a study on police, while receiving his American doctoral degree with a study on corporate legal departments. He has published or edited more than a dozen books in Japanese and English. His first English book, Policing in Japan (SUNY Press 1992), received the 1993 Distinguished Book Award of the Division of International Criminology of the American Society of Criminology. One of his most recent books in Japanese is the first casebook on legal ethics in Japan that is co-edited with two lawyers one of whom has become a Supreme Court Justice. He has been highly active in the promotion of judicial reform in Japan and is one of the most prominent proponents of the introduction of the American-style graduate professional law schools into Japan. He has also been active in the Law and Society Association in the US, twice serving on its Board of Trustees. He co-founded the Collaborative Research Network 33 in East Asian Law and Society, which is now the largest Collaborative Research Network in the Law and Society Association. The Law and Society Association awarded its International Prize to Professor Miyazawa in 2014.

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